Year of the Rat, page 15
part #4 of Changeling Sisters Series
I pulled back and felt Demon brush my mind, cool and assessing. He has information.
Wolf barked, clearly distrustful of anything the enemy had to offer.
I stroked Wolf’s fur, reassuring. We must. We are losing this war.
“Please,” the man said again. He took a step back, swaying, and then swept open his wool coat with blood-slick fingers. It was enough for me to see the extra canister of ammunition clipped to his belt. I glanced from the discarded gun back to the man’s face. The captain smiled bleakly.
I snatched up the ammunition and rifle, never turning my back on him. Mikhail didn’t stop me. Finally, I wrapped my robotic fingers around Mikhail’s wrist so he could feel the brute strength in them. “What bit you?” I asked again.
Mikhail released his breath. “Werelizard,” he grunted out, pain spasming behind his eyelids. “I think.”
“You think,” I repeated flatly. However, as his arm wrapped around my neck for support, I finally knelt so we could rise together. “Well, let me tell you something. You are about to have a new family. A Were family. In fact, some of your reptile brethren are fearlessly making a stand back there. They are all that stands between us and the Death Lords. So I will take you with me, but only if you understand that you are not human anymore, Captain. You’re Were.”
Mikhail grunted humorlessly. “Da, little wolf. But I never will be if we do not get the hell out of here. Which safe house is closest?”
I snorted and tugged him along. My golden eye gleamed as I caught sight of the sloped blue tile roof and boarded windows glinting amongst the smokestacks of a nondescript neighborhood. “Let’s just call it a place where light is born.”
Chapter: 24: Fine Things
~Citlalli~
I never imagined that when I returned to Old Man Zhi’s lantern shop, it would be in the company of an enemy solider. This place of invention was supposed to be my contribution to Yong Enterprises: the gift of lantern-making. The ability to bring magical creations to life that would help the problems of the living and spirit folk alike. Old Man Zhi had honed his craft for a long time, and I had barely skimmed the surface of his designs. There was supposed to be wonder here. There was supposed to be a future.
However, to my foul-tempered prisoner, this was just a place with a roof intact in an otherwise war-torn city. He limped across the debris-strewed room, cursing as he tripped over mangled lanterns chewed down to the wiring.
I took one step through the door and then stopped. An unbearable tightness spread across my chest. I was hit with every sensation of familiarity mixed with a surreal other tone, as if I had woken up in a reality gone horribly wrong. A spider web crack stretched across the dark galleria, which allowed the winter wind to moan through a room smelling of mud-caked snow. Broken bulbs lay like a trail of cracked eggshells across the workbench. And shredded on the floor were years of painstakingly crafted lanterns.
“Mangdung?” I whispered to the darkness. Not one whisker twitched in the upper rafters. Not one ghostly breath cooled my neck asking for a lantern that could show the way on. No specters lingered. Even during Maya’s reign, the spirits had still called Eve home. But here, in this weird inter-dimension suffering from the Yeouiju’s Curse… I couldn’t feel myself here. This shop wasn’t real. It wasn’t anything. In fact, I couldn’t tell if we were dead or alive.
Mikhail reappeared lugging a large roof beam up the steps. “Remember who is injured again, little girl,” he grunted.
I hefted the rifle, all too eager to snap my attention back to him. “Oh no, Captain. Remember who is the prisoner.”
“Prisoner!” He chuckled but dragged the wood to the front door. “We need to barricade the entrance and go underground. There will be a huge wraith infection in this district after that damned Death Lord’s visit.”
A sudden twinge in his ankle caused him to almost drop the beam on his foot. He swore violently in Russian and had to brace himself on a collapsed shelf. “Fuck! Girl, what does this curse mean to do to me? My skin feels dry to the bone.”
I shrugged, kicking the beam a little at a time to wedge it in place. “Hell if I know. You’re turning into a lizard, not a wolf. Maybe you need to molt out of your skin to complete the transformation.” I met his flat look with a grin. “You know. Scales.”
“Vodka,” was his only reply before disappearing back into the kitchen.
I smiled and cast a last glance outside. Just one last check before I joined him. Yet it wasn’t alcohol I needed. My body was in desperate need of meat. Raw meat. The march had been long, cold, and mind-draining, and the attack had strained my limbs to their limit. Surely the zombies hadn’t found my stash of shrimp chips here.
Shouts still echoed in the distance. Now and again, there was another crackle of gunfire that made me winch. Thank God, there were no signs of those unnaturally quick undead. The road was long and dark to the east, but to the south—
My breath caught. Something flitted amongst the street lamps, almost impossible to catch as clouds darted like dark steeds across the face of the moon. Bolts of neon light rebounded off apartment doors and windows as if desperately seeking sanctuary.
The Death Lords? I renewed barricading the entrance, dashing around the destroyed lantern shop to grab the heaviest furniture I could find.
I was too late. The wandering lights had found me. They hovered before the door in the form of a gigantic glowing dragon.
“Ankor?” I whispered. The lights flickered in the wind on the verge of going out. Hesitantly, I stretched out a finger to touch the dragon’s horned brow.
A warm body toppled me over backwards. I landed in a pile of plush lanterns and looked up to see the quivering Korean boy huddled on the floor. Eventide light still twinkled in his hair and pulsed in his skin like bioluminescent scales.
He was also very naked. Thin, dark skin hugged his hunched shoulder blades like wing tissue. A bearded serpent inked in black decorated his back. His forearms were covered in nasty burn marks, and his hair hung in a jumbled mess over his face. This was a feral boy worlds away from the smartly dressed, gelled-haired man who ran Yong Enterprises’s laboratories division.
I extended his glasses, the lens visibly fractured from our last encounter. His hand snaked out to seize them.
“Um.” I cast around, biting my lip. “We’re a little short on clothes here.”
“Not now, Citlalli,” Ankor said wearily. Trudging over to the work bench, he bent to salvage what fabrics he could. I might have looked, just to make sure he wasn’t badly hurt. Demon jerked my head away with a scoff.
Please. I could snap him in two.
“Are you all right?” I shoved an armful of musty wet blankets in his direction. “How did you know to come here? This isn’t a designated shelter.”
Ankor wrapped the blanket around himself and stared blankly ahead, as if his mind were still a million tiny particles wandering through the air. “I…found you.”
“How?” I uncovered a fire lantern patched out of faded red squares and lit it with Demon’s touch. It summoned a cheerful ruby flame, a far cry from the roaring blaze that had destroyed enemy lines. We huddled around it, the warmth bringing color back to our cheeks.
Ankor hesitated, looking sideways at my robotic arm. “That material is made with minerals I mined from deep within the earth. When I shifted to fight off the zombies, I used too much power. I disintegrated. I think I was—”
“In the Triad state,” I said quietly, feeling wisps of Demon’s smoke curl through my head. “The third part of your soul was in control.”
Ankor’s breathing quickened. “I didn’t have any sense of self. I was in the sky. I was falling like rain down rooftops. I was sinking into the mud. I was everywhere, but I couldn’t—anchor to anything. Everything was hot white pain. But then I sensed those minerals.” He nodded shakily toward my arm. “Bits and pieces though they are, they called to me. And I followed them to you.”
My heart thumped, and I leaned closer to him. “My arm’s battery power is getting low.”
He gave a raggedy chuckle. “Let me rest before I try and charge it.”
There came a bang from below, and Ankor fell back with a hiss. Mikhail lurched his way up the stairs, his hair in disarray and his pantleg rolled up to his knee. In the dim light of the lantern, we could see the hairline cracks creeping up his shin as if he were made of porcelain. The captain collapsed in a heap and gestured to his wound with a bottle of soju, clearly the closest thing he could find to vodka. “Hey, girl, the prisoner needs medical attention now.”
Ankor blurred for the rifle I had propped up against the shelf, but I beat him to it. Shaking my head, I put my hand on his. “It’s okay, Ankor. This man is in my custody.”
Ankor tried to duck under my arm, but his movements were sluggish. I blocked him again.
“A prisoner is a liability, Citlalli,” he hissed. “A prisoner will give us away.”
“Ah. The dragon princeling.” Mikhail twiddled with the bottle’s cap and adopted Aleksandr’s high, imperious tone: “‘I will make Mun Mu’s son into my new rug. And as for his daughter, her skin will drape my throne.’” He took a swig of soju and then wrinkled his forehead as another spasm of pain wracked his leg. “The Frost King is not the most creative when he rants.”
Ankor stopped arguing to cast a low, dangerous look in the soldier’s direction.
“You see?” I whispered persistently. “He has information.”
“Not for much longer. Gah!” Mikhail reeled over, both of his legs seized with tremors. Scales tore through his combat gear, and his features began to invert into a smoother, rounder shape—reptile.
“A shift.” Ankor regarded the man thrashing around on the floor with the detachment of a scientist observing an experiment. “Komodo dragon. The strain arrived in Korea back in the time of the Silk Road, as did many of the shifter viruses. My ancestors, the Yongs, were quick to train them as elite bodyguards. We found the wolves to be too emotional,” he added with a half-smile in my direction.
“I’m about to be fucking emotional,” Mikhail snarled as froth leaked down his lengthening tongue. “What the hell is happening to me?”
“You’re molting.” Ankor met the man’s astonished look and then picked up the discarded bottle of soju to pour himself a shot. “You know. Scales.”
Mikhail swore impressively at him in Russian, but Ankor only poured himself another shot. I raised an eyebrow. The ore imugi rarely drank. He must be more shaken than I thought.
Mikhail’s eyelids receded, leaving behind two crazed pale orbs rolling in their place, and I leaned closer in fascination. I remembered my own transformation painfully enough, but this was the first time I had witnessed a different werespecies’ shift in excruciating detail.
“There is nothing to do but make sure you do not hurt yourself,” Ankor told the writhing man. “You are one of my kind: an Elementus, a Were with an attachment to the earth. As long as your feet are on the ground, you will be able to transform.”
I shook my head in amazement. “Raina never changed like this. She just sort of—ran off a cliff. And then she was flying.”
“That’s because she had gone through the shift.” Ankor took another gulp, wrinkling his forehead in mild distaste. “Sometime in her early childhood. In the bathtub, perhaps. Or your pool.”
“We didn’t have a pool—”
He waved a dismissive hand. “I’m sure the Alvarezes frequented the local YMCA. The point is, your sister is like us: a born weredragon. We were never human. Our Weres don’t talk or argue with us the way first generation Weres’ do. So Raina’s first shift may not have been noticeable. I don’t remember mine, but Nyssa told me Appa dropped me down a mineshaft and waited for me to fly back out.”
I bit my lip, glancing at Mikhail. His hands shook as they flopped all over the floor. Blunt claws burst from his finger joints, and Mikhail began to scream and scream.
Cold satisfaction at the enemy’s anguish gave way to familiar pain. My own shift was suddenly vivid in my mind, down to the demonic wolf face leering back at me in the glow of the river. I remembered Rafael demanding to know why Yu Li had failed to warn me about how to prepare. I knelt at Mikhail’s side.
“Hey, Captain,” I said softly, turning his head toward mine. The lidless blue eyes met mine where they sat surrounded by a sea of shark fin scales and bits of pink flesh. I swallowed hard but then grabbed his clawed hand. “You need to give into it. Give your Were control.”
His answer was a hiss of static.
“Unless you want to be like me,” I grinned, my single golden eye a luminous moon in the darkness. “The Demon Wolf. I like to do things the hard way. Your Were is speaking to you. I’m not sure what he’ll sound like, and he’s most likely a raging asshole like you, but you need to listen to him. You think the pain can’t get any worse. But it can. And it will be permanent if you don’t give up control now.”
A long forked tongue flicked at me as if to say piss off. But suddenly, his icy blue eyes receded to a stony dark gray color. The soul shade of his inner Were. His knife-ridge scales rose to form a giant backbone, which split through the remainder of his clothing. His new thickset tail swung large, slashing circles around the room. The Komodo dragon rose up on four legs, nearly nine feet long from nose to tip.
“Damn.” I took an involuntary step back. “No wonder your chose these guys to be your royal guard. They’re goddamn dinosaurs.”
Ankor was still more interested in downing soju like it was water. “Wait until he learns to stand on his hind legs. You can still control your prisoner, right?”
I jumped as Mikhail’s tail nearly clipped me. The giant lizard-man took a couple halting steps across the room before testing the air with his tongue.
“Um…right. Pretty sure I have a Komodo-sized leash somewhere.”
The lizardman abruptly swung toward the basement and waddled down the steps at an alarmingly quick rate.
“He’ll be starving,” Ankor observed.
“Shit.” I bolted to my feet, the pangs of hunger beating in my sides. “That’s where Old Man Zhi kept his larders. Hurry, before he takes all the food!”
∞∞∞
I’d never raided a kitchen with a couple of reptile dudes, but the competition was comparable to being trapped in a face-off with ravenous quarterbacks. I tore open bags of ramyeon with shaking fingers and crunched the noodles in my palm before swallowing them whole. I ripped the flavor packet open last and whimpered in happiness when the salty seasoning touched my tongue. Mikhail was chomping his way through stale shrimp chips in a fury, and Ankor almost ran into me, he was so excited about having found preserved peaches.
I squeezed a full fruit cup into my mouth, determined to devour every drop of syrupy sweetness. Then I devoured the next one. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t think, or else all of this precious sugar and salt would disappear. I ate until my stomach hurt. I ate until I was puking into a can of months-old trash, and then the smell alone made me hurl again.
“Hey, slow down,” Ankor’s voice murmured. I felt him pull sticky black curls off my face. He offered me a water bottle. “Your body isn’t used to this much food. Your stomach has shrunk.”
I sank back against the wall and sipped water until I was clear-headed again. It seemed so incredible that only a few years ago, I had first entered this lantern shop by breaking into the kitchen with the trickster Fred. Now in this cold other dimension, it had saved my life.
Wolf whined, Its stomach still shriveled to a dangerously high arch. I swallowed, glancing around for meat, but of course it had all gone bad. Then I saw it: a dust-covered can of spam. I cracked the lid and chomped it down, watery gunk and all. When I finished, I could feel my inner Were’s gratitude bringing new energy to my body.
Mikhail had figured out how to shift back, or maybe he’d done so unconsciously. Either way, a naked Russian now sat dazed in the middle of a kitchen turned upside down with crumbs of rice crackers stuck in his beard and sweet red bean jelly smeared across his mouth.
A cry caused me to whirl around on the defensive, but it was only Ankor, who had removed the lid of a large stoneware jar. “Kimchi?” he whispered. We joined him around the pot. Then, solemnly, we all began to feast. We scooped up handfuls of cold, rubbery cabbage until it stained the insides of our fingernails red and set our mouths ablaze, and yet still, we kept digging. The spicy leaves were far more fermented than I had ever encountered, but I didn’t care. This reminder of familiarity, of home, permeated every core of my brain and made me eat until I cried.
Later, we sat in the middle of our pungent-smelling mess with beers, staring at my walkie-talkie. My bionic arm hummed pleasantly in the green once more, Ankor having successfully recovered enough to charge it.
“Your broken glasses.” Mikhail gestured toward Ankor with the dusty beer bottle. “Zombies?”
Ankor took a swig of beer and then jerked his head in my direction. “Worse.”
The walkie-talkie wheezed to life. “Beta… Beta, do you read me? Alpha over.”
“Yu Li?” My nails dug into the table, and my eye flooded with hot tears. Both men looked at me, and I hastily ducked my head closer to the transmitter. “Beta and Ore Imugi reporting in, alive and well.”
“That is good to hear, Beta.” Pride deepened her tone. “The wolves will rule the Red Night.”
“We shall rule,” I agreed, clutching the walkie-talkie eagerly. “What news? Are you safe?”
“The pack is all accounted for.”
Waves of relief swept through my chest. I hadn’t realized how wound up I’d been, my body still trapped in that state of hyper vigilance, until she’d said those words.
“Brother?”
Sun Bin’s voice crackled across, and Ankor released a similarly tense breath.
“Noona.” Older sister.
There was a strangled laugh on the other end. “See? I told you I would get you to admit it.”
Ankor smiled. “Yah, so now you have to make it back so you can brag to everyone about who is older, you hear me?”
